Narrators and their Reporting in the Prose Romance Trilogy of Giovanni Francesco Biondi

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In the judgement of some of his contemporaries, Giovanni Francesco Biondi, the first seventeenth-century Italian writer to publish a romance in prose, is among the few to distinguish themselves in the new genre. The impression one gains from reading Biondi’s trilogy is that there has been stylistic vigilance in representing situation and character interaction. There are some departures from the narrative techniques found in earlier chivalric romances, especially in reporting speech. The present study looks at the relationship between some of these stylistic effects and the author’s possible intention of mirroring aspects of the contemporary cultural-social environment within his trilogy.